Senator Bernie Sanders told a town hall in Berlin, New Hampshire Tuesday that as president, he would use U.S. aid to Israel as “leverage” to end “racism” there.
Asked why it mattered to him to “fight to end the occupation” in Israel, Sanders replied, “[W]e respect Israel, Israel has ever right in the world to live in peace and security, but so do the Palestinian people…
So what you have is a situation — and by the way, the fault is not all with Israel, you’ve got very poor and corrupt Palestinian leadership — but what the goal of the United States has got to be, is to bring people in the region together, the Palestinians and the Israelis, to create a kind of workable peace that works for both parties… The United States government gives a whole lot of money to Israel. And I think we can leverage that money to end some of the racism that we have recently seen in Israel,” he concluded.
Sanders has labeled the Netanyahu administration “racist” before. As Joel Pollak noted at Breitbart News, “to many anti-Israel activists and Arab states, the very existence of Israel, and the Zionist ideology of Jewish national self-determination, is by definition racist.”